At any rate, I’m off on a holiday as of tomorrow evening, and looking forward to my first real break since last July. (Conferences and uni trips are fun, but not exactly relaxing a lot of the time, and the Foundation Day long weekend I spent in Albany just wasn’t long enough.) The plan is for five of us to go to Melbourne for a few days (including taking in the battle for the priority draft picks, aka the Fremantle-Melbourne AFL game; and no, I’m not a Dockers or Demons supporter, so that’s going to hurt), drive very slowly through the snowfields in the general direction of Sydney, then catch a Bledisloe Cup game the weekend after next and return triumphant. And hopefully relaxed.

Obviously if you have open DB bugs, are breathlessly waiting for long-overdue action on the Dubnium front, or really want a new feature in wp-gopher, you may be waiting a bit longer.

I’d apologise for the above, but I’d be lying through my back teeth as I did it. I’ve been looking forward to this for months.

Oddly enough, I’ve had plans for next weekend since the start of the year, so I breathed a bit of a sigh of relief when the reunion was plonked on the same weekend; I mean, it saved an awkward excuse to cover not being very interested in seeing pretty much anyone from my high school. Broadly speaking, the (single digit figure of) people I want to be in touch with I’m still in touch with, with only one or two exceptions.

Still, it got me thinking back. I mean, what conversations would I realistically have given the shared experiences feel like a lifetime ago? Hell, I’m a pretty different person these days to the guy I was in 1998. Conversations? They’d be one liners at best; to whit:

• The bully: So, hey, how about that ear thing you tried once outside science class? Did you ever stop breathing through your mouth?
• The sort of friend of convenience I didn’t bother keeping in touch with: Yeah, sorry about the whole not calling thing. For, like, eleven years. How ’bout them Eagles?
• The druggie (hell, which one?): Did you end up killing all your brain cells, or did you get lucky like me and manage to wise up before that point?
• Most perilously of all, the first serious crush: Shit, you were all I wanted when I was thirteen. Subconsciously, I still compare every partner to you, no matter how unattainable you are living there almost fifteen years in the past (because really, I can only think about how you were then; I know nothing about you now). So, uh… how’s the food?

How the hell do you respond to any of that? And presumably I’d be getting similarly awkward conversational gambits my way (heard you got kicked out of a university less than twelve months out of high school — way to go, man!) which I’d have equally little interest in engaging with.

Maybe I’ll have more perspective in time for the twentieth. In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy my lost weekend next week with my friends.

• Buy music
• Choose clothes to wear from my extensive collection of XKCD shirts
• Prepare any sort of work presentation that needs to be upbeat and cheery
• Read Questionable Content’s archives

Whoa. I might just add don’t read Webcomics to that.

On an unrelated note, I had another meeting with my supervisor this afternoon about my India documentary, which is now due in just eight short days. (Theoretically I have nine, but if I get the project done in eight I get to spend a four day weekend in Albany with friends not worrying about it.) As has become the pattern for those meetings, I spent a couple of hours beforehand frantically working in an attempt to ignore the knots in my stomach, danced around the explanation of the incomplete work that I was supposed to have completed, Keith did his best to not look too disappointed with me, and we agreed on yet another course of action moving forward.

The silver lining is that I’ve learned plenty of things this semester. Unfortunately, the key lessons seem to have been things I shouldn’t ever attempt again, namely corporate videos and solo projects. I guess I at least know my capabilities (or lack thereof) a bit more now.

I shan’t bore people with the whole lot, but my favourite image so far has been dreaming that I was still working at iiNet, going to my old desk (now sadly taken over by call centre people), and peering over the partition into the marketing area to see nobody there but a massive dragon sitting at one of the marketing co-ordinator’s desks reading Facebook and singeing the office plants every time he laughed at someone’s post. Come to think of it, I don’t even know how the hell the talons worked with the keyboard and mouse.

On the bright side, I now have a hell of a lot of stuff to work into short film scripts. I guess being sick isn’t all bad after all.

Our hero quit his job and was deassimilated from the Borg, travelled to India via Sri Lanka, and was last heard from on a bus from Delhi to Noida.

And now, the unexciting conclusion…

That was, as the dates indicate, about two and a half months ago. Indeed, I returned from India, as expected, in late February and have since taken up my new job (which, oddly enough, has put me back at my old desk) and have been feverishly working on the two productions that I’m expected to edit the India footage into (with, it has to be said, remarkably little success, as the rather depressing supervisor meeting I had on Wednesday reinforced).

Why the break in transmission? I’m not sure, really. I did write a few more journal entries while I was in India, but found that I ran out of energy at a certain point and really just wished I could learn how to sleep on buses, and then with the editing workload back here, combined with picking up the new job baton (a whole 48 hours after I landed back in Perth!), I just don’t seem to have had the creative energy for it.

India, for the record, was good fun. There’s been a little bit of unpleasantness since returning (nothing related to me, but it still casts a slight pall over the experience), but it was an incredibly worthwhile trip, all told. In the end, I think Bangalore was probably my favourite of the four cities we stayed in, but they were all interesting and (often surprisingly) different in their own rights. The filming went OK, but as I’ve said to a few people since returning, it really was no more than OK, and probably reminded me of why I was hesitant to get heavily involved in production units in the first place — I just don’t quite seem to have a natural feel for what needs to be shot and how the way a lot of other people do, and when you’re shooting ephemeral events in a documentary style, you have to have that feel.

I also have a huge queue of photos to upload, too, starting with some from last November (sorry Dean!) and then the photos from India. All… find . -name *.jpg | wc -l… 413 of them. (Yikes, particularly since I know I discarded at least twice as many while I was there, too.) I’ve been meaning to get started on that particular job since I got back, but the thought of sitting down and writing titles and descriptions for each of them has just sapped my energy each time I’ve opened my laptop to get going.

Tonight I’m off to the 4×4 Film Festival at uni, which is the twice-yearly competition between second and third year production students to see who can make the best four minute film. (Third years get handicapped by needing to edit in-camera, which having done it last year, is actually a pretty significant handicap for a lot of genres.) This semester’s theme is horror, which should be entertaining, and for once, I might be scared by more than the usual shoddy student acting.

In that spirit, I’ll sign off with this dodgy YouTube version of a horror film I worked on last year for uni. (We were apparently just a year ahead of the curve. That’s what I’m telling people who ask about the grade I received for it.) It’s seven and a bit minutes of… something. I’m not really sure what.

I find myself strangely fascinated by this election. I mean, Barackstar is pretty obviously going to win, unless the pollsters are having an even worse year than politicians without any common sense, but after the dull 2004 campaign (not to mention the WA state election that excitement forgot a couple of months back — at least until the votes started getting counted), it’s just nice to have an interesting contest.

For the rest of my day, editing, stop-motion filming, and cooking a chicken tikka masala await.

Man, I just hope this election’s called early so that I actually get most of that done.

* This AST, not this AST. Don’t get them confused. It’s embarrassing trying to parse some source code and realising you’ve just got Tanenbaum on a plane instead of loading the syntax tree library.†
† Yep, I think end of semester madness has set in again.

I got a real, paying job, which I start on Monday. It’s a Perl <insert inarticulate grumble here> programming role (people in Perth probably already know who it’s with just based on that). I’ll likely post more details on that when I figure out what it’s really all about. For now, it just feels strange to be going back to full-time work after 54 weeks out of the saddle.

After dithering on the subject, I did end up signing up for a Graduate Certificate in film stuff. I only have time to do one unit a semester, but that’s enough to keep the creative juices going. I hope. First project: a music video, due in about three weeks, give or take. Now I just have to resist the urge to do everything in stop motion.

Frustratingly, not only am I still not allowed to drive after my overly dramatic collapse in Melbourne in January — barrels of fun when you live in the sticks with wildly inadequate public transport — but I haven’t even had the required follow-up with a neurologist yet. (I have, however, had all the requisite tests, and everything has apparently come back normal. Yes, that means I now have scientific proof that I actually have a brain.) Most of the neurologists in Perth have, as a minimum, three month waiting lists even for private patients, and having found one who didn’t have such a long waiting list and who had a good reputation, he’s since cancelled my appointment six times. We’re going for number seven tomorrow, and if it doesn’t go ahead, it’s going to be mighty awkward mighty fast with my forthcoming work commitments to schedule another appointment — with him or anyone else.

Truthfully, given the difficulty I’ve had getting places since I got back from Melbourne (friends and family have been good, but there’s only so much you can ask), I’ve spent entirely too much time at home feeling sorry for myself in the last few weeks, and not enough time doing stuff. Including blogging. Really, it’s time to kick myself out of this funk. So, to summarise this self-indulgent post:

…because, hey, it beats the hell out of just watching TV all day.

Base image Mastermind Azrael taken by Kjirstin, and used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.

Speaking of which, sorry, people waiting for a PEAR DB release. I haven’t forgotten about you.

Anyway, some things are happening, at least. The Computer Science project I’m working on is cool, and terrifyingly large in scope at present. (I’ll write a proper blog post about that later in the week, hopefully.) My latest film project has started shooting, and as we work our way through that process, I’m gradually realising just how much I’ve dropped myself in it as editor. The next time I write a script with that much chromakey work in it, I’m making sure that I don’t actually have to do anything related to said chromakeying. As things stand, I have to composite four — actually, it might be five, now that I think about it — scenes in post, including one against a virtual set which I’ve only had time to partially build so far. I mean, There are walls. There’s a screen. There isn’t anything resembling a door, though, and I still have to match the lighting to the actual set-up we’re using against the bluescreen, so partially built might be optimistic. Slightly built might have been a better phrase. Next time, we’re using flats, even if I have to spend all weekend painting them.

It’s interesting watching shooting take place for a script I wrote, though. I’m sure it’s even more fulfilling for Reuben, our director, since it was his story idea in the first place, but I keep feeling both proud of the fact that the scenes being shot are the ones I scribbled out, and worried that if we suck, it’s going to be largely my fault — you can talk about how the director is the true author of the film all you want, but JMS has referred to certain things on Babylon 5 being writer problems, and I suspect that most of the potential issues with this film are going to be in that basket.

At least I get the chance to fix them in post. (We’ll fix it in post is the film student mantra, it seems.) Of course, said fixing might require sock puppets…

Yep. Just like that.

For the first time in fourteen weeks, I’ve managed to go two days without needing to work on (or think about) university. The clichés of clean country air and peace and quiet have worked their wonders — I’ve even managed to have two good nights’ sleep in the face of a sleep-talking roomie, so things must be looking up.

Yesterday we went on a hired minivan for a wine tasting trip. (We also took a trailer for the wine, which turned out to not be overkill as I thought, but just enough kill.) Our hosts, David and Anne, clearly know their wine, and we went to a succession of outstanding wineries, most notably Xabregas just outside Narrikup. While the cellar is encased in barbed wire and looks like a viticultural Guantánamo, the wine is fantastic. It’s even more fantastic when you realise that the riesling on sale for $50 a case is actually an outstanding wine in its own right — thank $DEITY for clearance sales! (Like I said, we needed that trailer.)

The last place we went was Zarephath Wines. It’s an interesting winery, as depending on who you ask, the six people who live there and run it belong to either a commune or a cult. Either way, they seem to have an unhealthy obsession with building and launching boats.

At any rate, despite a couple of slightly iffy moments (the guest book which asked for basically every personal detail except blood type and tax file number was an interesting take on the idea), the expected big push to consider their movement didn’t come, thankfully. Better yet, the wine there was pretty good too, if not quite as good as Xabregas.

Today most of the group have gone up to the Porongorups again to check out a bamboo farm before lunch, but I’ve decided to be difficult and have instead come into Albany by myself. The Albany Car Classic is on, which has caused a few annoying road closures (why can’t we walk down the eastern footpath on Aberdeen St, if no cars are crossing it?), but my mission was to come to Dylans and test out their pancakes once again.

Happily, Dylans is just as good as I remember. In fact, apart from a few minor things (such as newer posters on the walls), it’s really exactly as I remember. It’s actually a little weird walking in and seeing everything as it was fifteen or more years ago. For a brief moment, I felt eight or nine again. Still does just as good a trade as it did then, too.

I need to walk back up shortly towards Dog Rock to get picked up, so I’d better go while it’s not raining. (The sun’s shining now, but I lived in Albany long enough to know that’s just a sign that it’ll probably rain again in five minutes.) I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend being just as relaxing as this; the only problem is that I’m not sure I’ll want to go back to Perth tomorrow and worry about my last scriptwriting assignment.

Damn. So much for three days without university-related thoughts.